People are increasingly utilizing portable electronic devices to perform various types of tasks. While the small size and light weight of these devices provide various advantages, these aspects come with certain limitations as well. For example, the size of a display screen on many of these devices is relatively small, less than four inches diagonally in many instances, such that it can be difficult to precisely select items displayed on a touch screen when using a human finger or thumb, which can have a contact area of over a quarter inch in diameter. A further complication with selecting the desired element on a display screen arises from the fact that the image displayed by the touch screen is not actually displayed on the top of the screen, or the outer surface, but an inner surface of the display. Due to the thickness of one or more layers above the actual display surface, there can be optical effects (e.g., parallax) that cause the apparent location of a virtual key displayed on the display screen to be offset from the location where that key is mapped to the touch-sensitive surface. Such an effect can further difficulty for certain users in selecting or providing the intended input.